There are too many good points my colleagues have made to touch on all of them thoroughly, so I'll stick to Ming's response, specifically her final paragraph, which piqued my interest:
"As for the impact of celebrity, I guess I wasn't surprised by the all-star roster of past performers of The Exonerated. Actors were able to contribute to a social justice cause by doing something that they do anyway, something that presumably rewarded and challenged them. I was most struck, actually, by reading in Blank and Jensen's "Uses of Empathy" piece that the actors started weeping when they heard, along with the audience, that a few of the exonerated themselves were also in the theater. What must that have felt like? To have been the conduit "channeling" who has contemplated the human suffering enough to play a part, and then be faced with the concrete figure of the person who lived that past? "
When I read Ming's entry, I went back and looked more carefully at the beginning of the script. I was struck by this notion of celebrity, and how it is used as a kind of currency, presumably to raise awareness and heighten visibility of plays, movies, products, what have you, thereby ensuring greater financial success, etc. This was also brought up by several others, anticipating the problems that come with negotiating the portrayal of real people by those who are obviously not those people, in an even more visible way than usual. Generally, when we go to the theatre, with notable exceptions, we are aware that the performers are not who they embody onstage. Then, perhaps we succumb to the trance that Brecht rails against, and we are drawn in to the world of the play, forgetting the distinction between actor and role, unless that delicate illusion is upset in some way. Sometimes it happens when an actor has a "human" moment onstage (like sneezing at an inopportune time), or when the technical aspects somehow fail to achieve the intended effect (costume malfunctions, light cues going on the fritz, etc.).
But with celebrity actors, it's doubly hard to forget who they are, and sometimes, that's deadly for the play.
I remember seeing John Malkovich in Lost Land at the Steppenwolf in college. He was horribly miscast, which was quite unfortunate, but I couldn't help looking at him constantly and saying to myself "Gee whiz, that's John Malkovich!". It threw me off my spectator game, so to speak. With a play like The Exonerated, which deals with very real people and their very real stories, how could having a celebrity play that part possibly work?
On the very first page of Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, he quotes Feuerbach in his preface to The Essence of Christianity: "But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence...illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness." (11)
So can we apply this to The Exonerated? Would having Susan Sarandon portray a real person, in real space and time, break the illusion, thereby profaning the piece? Perhaps. I think it's safe to assume that anyone who recognizes a performer will have an initial reaction of "Oh, I know them!" or "OMG! It's Patti LuPone!", but depending on the piece and the performer, there is still a possibility for the illusion to be re-crafted. I'm not sure that having famous actors perform in The Exonerated would do the script any justice. The kind of tension and dissonance that would be created might work against what Jensen and Blank have attempted to achieve. It is a piece about the utter normalcy of each of these multifaceted, mundane people who find themselves pitted against a rabied American justice system that ultimately fails them, though they are eventually freed. Seeing Vincent D'Onofrio attempting to embody a real human being other than himself, with a real, tangible history, would just work against the play in myriad ways.
1 comment:
I'm just wondering about your sentences: "Would having Susan Sarandon portray a real person, in real space and time, break the illusion, thereby profaning the piece? Perhaps." Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I think this is the opposite of the dynamic Debord is describing in the selection you quoted. I read Debord as saying that the sign, the copy, the representation, the appearance, the illusion are considered sacred by people today. So wouldn't that mean a celebrity actor would call our attention to the fact of illusion, thus making it more sacred? And by the same token, if there is too much of the original being portrayed on stage, if there is too much verisimilitude or conflation between the actor and the character, too much overemotionalization or re-living of experience (instead of the telling, as in Brecht's street scene), then it would seem profane. At least that's how I'm reading it. Thus, it's difficult to portray 9/11 in theater...and we can't have statues depicting the woman falling. From my understand, then, you seem to disagree with Debord's theory. Am I understanding your post correctly?
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